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nankeen posted:one day i might just start collating the stories of un-begun but deeply loved webcomics and the people who attempted to give birth to them, it would make a good documentary and heartbreaking insight into the human soul I would read the poo poo out of this, though I guess I can get the same effect by going through the old ComicGenesis guide or the links page on any comic site
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Jun 3, 2019 00:56
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Where do you go to talk about poo poo? Like besides this thread, which tends to get a few posts in a month I started my comic 10 years ago at a time when I think webcomics were just past their peak of popularity. Back then there were plenty of forums and sites to sign up with where you could talk with other people in the same hobby. Now it feels like everything's just dying off if not already dead. Idk if it's just because I'm old and didn't follow the trend of where things were going, or if it's because I fell out for a while and then got back into things recently, but it seems like 99% of the people who were active anywhere a few years ago are gone and I guess it just makes me kind of sad. Tumblr and other more recent similar social media seem really lovely for sustained dialogue, or actually getting to know anybody. SmackJeeves got bought out by some google-related company and I had hoped that would bring new life to the community but it just seems to have followed along a steady decline I poked a bit around the tapastic forums which seem active, but something about the layout makes it hard for me to follow discussions. That seems like the best bet rn though I guess it's probably in my best interest to stop looking for a community, and just focus on making my comic for the 3 people worldwide that read it now and then, but shooting the breeze with other artists was fun and rewarding back in the day and I miss having those interactions with people.
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Jul 7, 2019 21:12
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Part of the problem for me is that I'm 100% just in this as a hobbyist. I'm not a professional, I'm not trying to become a professional. I never got seriously "into it" in terms of going to cons, etc, part because what I do isn't marketable and more because I'm not enough into anything else to make a convention worth my time and money. 8-10 years ago I had people to talk to in the same boat, folks just in it for fun, or people (mostly fellow college students) who *were* on the road to doing art as a full time job but kept their comic as a fun side hobby. The problem with a hobby is when life changes, oftentimes you stop doing your hobby, so the overwhelming majority of those folks moved on. I've reached out to a few people recently- found their (mostly inactive) dA or whatever, sent a message just asking how they're doing, etc, but most people who were into art/comics as a hobby just aren't into it anymore. Heck, like, out of the 100 people that have "favorited" my comic, I think only maybe 8 are still active SmackJeeves users, and that's just readers. So like, I never ascended to be someone who "made it" and does this as a full or even a part time "job" however you want to define that, but I never completely outgrew wanting to do this for fun either. Do I spend as much time daily, weekly, annually on my comic as I used to in college? No, but I haven't dropped it either. So it's awkward. I'm like halfway between the two "worlds" so to speak. I'll keep making comics, because i like my story regardless of whether anyone else does, but the environment has gotten very lonely. Sorry for rambling. I'm day drinking and getting sad
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Jul 10, 2019 18:01
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It seemed like every community I came to, I got in after the drama had subsided, or was fading out/small-time stuff like a troll whooshing through and trying to be an edgelord or a dumb but well intentioned person digging up old dead threads and posting as if they were still active. New people stopped coming, old people stopped returning, posts by spambots sometimes outnumbered posts by humans on a weekly basis. I guess that's what happens when you have a communtiy built around a hobby that is mostly a solitary pursuit. Like most people don't decide to make a webcomic for the social and personal interactions One thing I'm sad I never did in my heyday was the 24 hour comic challenge. I used to, on maybe a monthly or bi-monthly basis, stay up until three or four in the morning working on comics, and had fancies of someday doing the 24-hour thing. Now the idea of having 24 hours plus recovery time to just throw away and spend on that is a brass ring. I had a friend IRL in college who also did a webcomic, and other friends who liked drawing even if they didn't publish stuff online. We probably could have put it together but it never happened.
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Jul 14, 2019 00:43
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nankeen posted:comics are just insane amounts of work. i think that is the beginning and end of the webcomic problem! not only are they insane amounts of work, but the very nature of cartooning means you're pouring all those hours into something that you actively hope people will look at and think "oh how effortless". unless you go the other way into hyper detail, of which k6bd is the pinnacle, and produce something that took eighty hours and it looks like it took eighty hours. but where are those eighty hours supposed to come from? it's kind of hard to sustain into your mid-late-20s and beyond unless you are literally an angel of the lord You know, it's obvious and I should ahve thought of it before, but this is really true. I haven't timed myself, and it's hard to get an accurate quantification because I tend to work in batches and I take a poo poo ton of breaks, but it probably takes anywhere from 5-10 hours to do a page start to finish. Even if I was doing that regularly and doing one update a week, that's still ~45 minutes to 90 minutes per day that an adult just doesn't always have. And I can understand the diminishing enthusiasm of spending that much time to make a page that 5 people not related to you will ever look at. I still do it, because I think it keeps me mentally stable [insert jokes about deranged webcomic artists i guess], but it's a time sink especially when you think of the hours of work that go into a whole archive that someone can blaze through in an afternoon. And while you start to streamline things and become more efficient, I think in general the better you get, the more time you tend to take on each page. poo poo, I used to churn out extremely crappy pages in like 3 hours. There was an albeit brief period where I updated twice a week. Crazy poo poo to think back on it. re: the privacy thing- I know everyone says they're an introvert, but yeah, drawing and webcomicing, while they were things i liked to talk aobut sometimes and my friends and I did some batshit collaborations on small pieces, were always things that were for "me time." My one friend I mentioned could take her sketchbook or tablet or whatever and work on a page while we were all hanging out, but I had a hard time doing that. It was like working on my comic was and still is a sacred mental space for me and wasn't something I could easily merge into a group setting.
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Jul 15, 2019 03:12
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Plethora posted:That's pretty much why I've been unwilling to open up much about my husband and I's own work. We've been a team for seven years now, and our longest project passed it's 300th page a little while back. Even so, we've stuck with our tiny audience on Deviant Art, our even tinier audience on Comic Fury, and our ten or so people on Patreon.  What's been people here's experience with having serious or currently political topics in their comics? I have some genderqueer storylines on the backburner and even though I have 5 readers total I'm just afraid about explicitly "going there" in regards to the way internet people can react to stuff if anyone did start paying attention. (either anger because they don't think XYZ topic is real/deserves attention, or because I'm not portraying something the way they feel is the correct and right way to portray something) Idk, I'm just getting a feeling of concern that's making me want to back down from writing that part of the character's story even though it's been telegraphed more or less from the start :/
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Aug 2, 2019 15:40
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Johnny-on-the-Spot posted:Mike Spittle's expression kills me. The pinched sphincter-like face of a man who ardently gives a poo poo about how much he does not give a poo poo
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Aug 22, 2019 02:52
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I like this cute frog
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Aug 30, 2019 19:21
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Webcomic host Smackjeeves is
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Nov 20, 2019 01:18
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I'm copying all of my site data (templates, etc), important conversations, private messages etc. to my own files because i don't trust this company and don't believe anything will be left "read only" or retrievable at all. It sucks. i was getting on a roll with updating again and this really knocked the wind out of my sails. I know of two other really long-running comics that were ending near (or in one case, actually ON) the day this poo poo is supposed to take place. It really sucks. I'm trying to look on the bright side and think about improvements I can make when I move (likely to ComicFury). Just sucks, I used to recommend SJ to everybody. I could probably check my post history in this thread alone and see 5 recommendations to people looking for hosts.
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Nov 23, 2019 02:30
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sweeperbravo posted:Webcomic host Smackjeeves is Somehow it managed to disexceed even my low expectations. The home page is dull and generic but that's more or less what I expected. However- -Try to go to a smackjeeves URL for a specific comic. You can't. There aren't any. All comics now have the smackjeves.com URL followed by a random character string. So you can't tell a friend "Oh yeah you can check out my great buttsex comic at buttsex.smackjeeves.com" You have to be ike "you can check out my great buttsex comic it's smackjeeves.com/1929-s-rje000" or whatever This means any link you had to your comic somewhere will now just link to the SJ homepage, where a reader will then ahve to manually search for your comic using the site search function. Idk about you but if I tried someone's direct url and it redirected to the host homepage I would assume that person had deleted their comic and probably not bother trying to search. Just another way they are trying to redirect people toward the specific comics they're trying to sell -They said the forums would be left up but in "read only" format. This is not true, following smackjeeves.com/forum takes you to an error page  -I deleted every page off my site except a redirect comic. Below that comic is now an ad, followed by my comment section... in reverse chronological order. So the last reply in the comment chain comes first and my author comment is all the way at the bottom of the page. It is designed to facilitate hit-and-run comments/"liking" and not actual interaction between users, which is icky and can't be monetized! -A friend with 860 pages reported that the archive now reads as 860 *chapters* -Another user said that chapters cap at 10 pages. This is a weird small number that doesn't jive with most longform story comics I've ever read! -Apparently the "coins" or whatever can be used to "rent" chapters of popular comics, but something is messed up with that system as well, like you can only rent one chapter at a time (remember 10 pages) and can't rent another one until that first rental expires At first I thought people were making a big deal of changes we knew were gonna suck anyway, but I don't know how it managed to be even worse than I expected. I hope any stakeholders here already moved house. edit : To be FAIR to NHN- apparently the forums are still viewable, but the URL changed. edit edit: You can now no longer pre-schedule updates. Congrats on that 20 page buffer! Enjoy staying up until midnight every Thursday to ensure it uploads when you want! (Or don't- we want you to upload in chapters so we can monetize your content more efficiently!) sweeperbravo fucked around with this message at 02:50 on Dec 4, 2019 |
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Dec 4, 2019 01:33
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fauna posted:this is so sad I didn't have that much clout, really- I was just a forums moderator. The other remaining mod was a lot more active in terms of coding help etc, I mostly just swept cobwebs and banned spambots and made shitposts people had to read because they couldn't put me on ignore. But neither of us were proper "admins" with any hand in the site-side operations. Going through my PMs to back up and save was the most emotional part for me- conversations I totally forgot I had with people who've long since moved on to other things. I was devastated, then angry, and then packed up and moved to Comic Fury. Weird and wonderful little corner of the internet. A *lot* of people have jumped ship and headed there as well. I'm at the "good riddance" stage of the grieving process now and can kind of just laugh at what's going on. In a weird way I lucked out because I feel the change actually screws over people with popular comics the most- the rest of us could just move without losing too much, but there are people who built their brand on their SJ site who now have this stripped down, embarrassingly broken "host" as a flagship. It seems like they're just removing all the parts that made it feel unique and like a community rather than a store, if that makes sense. The moves they're making are all toward mobilization and monetization of content. I don't think either was inherently a bad goal but the changes came through without any community feedback and we had 2 weeks to copy paste all our poo poo we needed to save. It's clear the site is now "for the buyer" than a host for the creator. The bright side is getting to know a new community and wanting to give the finger to the new sj company has given me a kick in the pants to dig into making comics again, and I've been more productive since the news dropped than I've been in a long time. I hope other folks who got uprooted get to the point where they feel that way as well.
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Dec 4, 2019 02:49
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The Halogens posted:I don't really feel like I have the skills for it yet, at least not to the level I want, but putting something out, learning as I go is better than sitting on it and risking it never being made, right? yes; the best way to start building those skills is to start making something. As you would not learn to ride a bike by reading about people riding bikes or watching videos of people riding bikes, you need to get on the bike yourself. Everyone hates the early stuff in their own archive*. Some people let this negativity prevent them from continuing to create because they become fixated on what they did years ago instead of what they're capable of doing now. A good mindset is to go into it knowing you're doing your best, and if you keep practicing, looking up information on techniques, trying new things, seeking feedback, your "best" will keep getting "better" and the stuff you're doing, especially since you're a beginner, a year or even half a year from now *should* look different from what you're doing today. It's actually one of my favorite things about this medium to be able to look at how much an artist has grown, especially since many comics span years and you can really see improvements. *I guess there's theoretically people that don't Everyone has a system that works for them, so you're probably going to go through a period where you're not sure what your work flow looks like exactly, or you might try something for a while and then need to change it up a few months down the line. You say you have the entire thing already written out in rough form which is a great starting point. Thumbnailing the first issue sounds great. Decide if you want to update as you create, or if you want to have that whole issue done before you start posting online. Each side has pros and cons- updating as you create- + you can potentially start getting reader feedback immediately which I personally have always found to be a tremendous motivator, moreso than anything else - even if you have a buffer of so many pages worth of updates, you might hit a snag where you're unable to upload something new; readers tend to be forgiving especially if they've subscribed to your comic in some way or as long as you don't fly off on hiatuses all the time, but you will lose some every time** updating after you've finished a whole chapter- + if you put up a good chunk of that whole chapter to begin with, a new reader has a lot of material to get invested in; if you're updating page by page, you know you automatically have a buffer for however many pages your issue has divided by how many times you want to post per week - by the time readers see your work, it's likely to have been a long time since you worked on it. I feel like issue updates may also run more into the snag of the "old art" problem above- as a new artist, let's say you thumbnail everything, great, now it's time ot sketch, great, now it's time to ink... but in that time you've learned a bit about composition, so some of your early thumbnailing and sketch work doesn't look right anymore.... or you ink, great, but in that time you've learned about lineart and now your earlier lineart doesn't look right anymore... you can push through this and just deal with it as an artifact of its time, but I know I've had problems in the past when I tried to add new art to old pages, working on old pages that don't show your current best just felt kind of lousy. Could be just me. You could also solve this problem by working on each page or scene to completion in order but holding off on just the posting part until the whole chapter is done. For someone starting out I recommend having like 5-10 pages finished and uploaded, a few more ready to go for the next week or two, and then moving to upload-as-you-create, but you know yourself better (or will get to know yourself better) and will know which option is more likely to motivate you to get more done. **losing individual readers after you've established a body of work- this will happen over time no matter how good your comic is or how much a reader likes it. Your readers' lives change and somebody who was able to keep up with webcomics last year might not be able to do it anymore. I had a few readers who regularly used to comment before i changed hosts, but their activity was a few years ago at least and I don't know if they're even aware the migration happened. What's your story about? Can you post some concept art? maybe you can get us all hooked
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Apr 24, 2020 16:30
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Everyone else already gave all the good compliments and good criticism so all I have to add is please let us know when/if you post it somewhere so I can keep reading and followign along with this deranged dude
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Nov 21, 2020 01:29
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Mercury Hat posted:Super clean inks, love em Sweet! I was thinking about you and some of the old keenspacers the other day. Glad to see you're still at it  I've had an extraordinarily fruitful year since moving from the now literally on its last breaths SJ* to ComicFury last November. For somethign I thought was going to be a huge setback, it actually ended up being the best thing that's happened to me, comic-wise, in years. I've almost finished an entire chapter and have been workign on a lot of silly side projects as well. *We didn't really talk about this here, did we? Last year, SmackJeeves got bought out by a company that turned it into an extremely generic, noncustomizable, "mobile-based"** host that filled no niche and disappointed everyone. Sometime this past month they finally announced they've been unsuccessful and the site will be shutting down entirely at the end of December. If you follow any comics that still host on SJ, just uh... well, get ready to update your bookmarks, I guess. **IIRC the mobile-friendly thing- spcifically having like an app and poo poo- just never came together properly. So everything good and recommendable about the site got axed in order to support a platform change that never made it off the ground.
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Dec 1, 2020 21:36
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readingatwork posted:Also I'd avoid SmackJeeves for the moment since it looks like the company got bought out recently and is going through some unfortunate changes which are pissing off everybody involved. Maybe consider them in a year or so if they've gotten their poo poo together by then. Yeah SmackJeeves is actually closing down entirely in like, 4 days. If you don't want to build from scratch, I recommend ComicFury. I moved my site there as soon as SJ started licking its lips and eyeing the shitter last November. Very customizable and the new design customization system is absolutely a delight to use- you have a WYSIWYG option so you don't have to play broken code roulette every time you want to change something. Additionally the community is chill, quirky, and cool if that matters to you. Really can't recommend this host enough. Anything I would have recommended about old (pre-2019) SJ you can find on CF, and the site owner is EXTREMELY responsive to community needs and is always actively improving, not "improving," the site. I've had more success there in the past year than I have in the almost twelve years i've been publishing online
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Dec 28, 2020 00:06
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Fortis posted:Despite the fact that the developer explicitly does not recommend using Dreamhost, I’m pretty drat interested in moving my comic away from WordPress forever. I’m going to assume that the recommendation against Dreamhost is made mainly on the assumption that the average user lacks any web hosting/server knowledge whatsoever. aaah congratulations! definitely feel that "come and go" of being really all about the work and then feeling really not into it for a while. 2020 was an unusually "on" year for me and then this year so far I haven't picked up a pencil once. But congratulations on that milestone, that's loving huge!
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Jan 17, 2021 23:04
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sustaining attention, or perhaps more accurately ignoring tedium and fatigue, for long enough to get pages done was a lot easier when i was able to drink
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Mar 2, 2021 00:58
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nice B) coloring traditionally is almost meditatively pleasing to me, it definitely has its drawbacks (like the difficulty with doing anything non-additive) but I find the variety of sensory feedback and lack of screen to be very enjoyable
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Apr 8, 2021 18:20
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I always start and then tap out around page like 5 :/ I also kind of feel like just a straight transcript of my comic (including blocking/choreography and scene descriptions) for a person with a visual impairment wouldn't be really entertaining for them, and that for the amount of work to make it actually worth their time, I'd be rewriting the thing in prose pretty much. Just the nature of the medium, there's a lot lost when the visual is lost, in a way I don't think you can really make up without completely *switching* the medium in which it's represented. Like it would be better to just do a chapter by chapter prose rewrite in order to take advantage of the strengths of prose, rather than trying to essentially do a Google Translate of each page. I'm not saying that to dissuade anyone or say it's not worthwhile to consider readers w/visual impairments, just for me it would be like, I dunno, being a composer and trying to verbally describe a piece i wrote so that a person with a hearing impairment could access it. The accessibility is there (and that's a worthy endeavor), but I'm not sure the entertainment is. Of course if you're willing and able to do this I think that's awesome and you should follow through.
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Apr 20, 2021 22:04
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Mercury Hat posted:My art is important to my creative process, and I wouldn't be doing this as a comic if I didn't think there was something inherent to the medium to let me tell my story, but I've also got the time and I'm willing to put in the effort to implement this other way of experiencing it. This is a really great perspective and I support you on your endeavor  I hope my post didn't come across like "lol don't."
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Apr 21, 2021 17:58
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Boba Pearl posted:No-one would read it, you can post your comics in the PYF Comics thread, and BYOB CCCC Webcomics thread, but if it's just a thread where goons post their comics it'd pretty much just be 3 - 7 of us posting at each other. this describes my webcomic making experience as it is I guess for some content, it's been over a year since I last worked on anything really comic related. I took a break after the last chapter ended because i n f a n t and things are still too hectic to really devote regular time these days. I'm currently stuck in a state where I need to work on the next chapter script (it was maybe 66% finished but the more I looked over it the more I realized it needed a complete overhaul), which is a really hard mind state to get into, it just requires so much... chilling? idk. And meanwhile I also wanna do other actual drawing stuff, I have ideas for little sketches and one offs I want to do but I have limited free time that is ocnstantly on the verge of being yoinked, so it's very hard to sit down and commit to doing anything i love my baby #noregrets I just miss doing my literal only hobby
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Jun 14, 2022 15:25
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i'm back in the saddle at last. lost a few years of growth because of like, having a baby lol but i'm trying to pick up the pieces. the love and want to draw is there but the time and energy aren't always. i also just don't have the patience for some stuff anymore so what little polish i ever had is pretty much gone. also they've discontinued the markers and the pen nibs i have been using since 2010 so that's gonna be a fun obstacle to overcome when i run out
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Mar 24, 2023 01:49
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